Trump’s Corruption: Explained

Trump Pardons a Tax Cheat Who Stole From a Nursing Home

In March, we learned President Donald Trump’s political action committee (PAC), MAGA Inc., was charging upwards of $5 million to attend dinners with him at Mar-a-Lago.

Accountability watchdogs and reasonable people nationwide were, understandably, aggravated by the bold, out-in-the-open opportunity for corruption.

Now, just a few months later, that mutually beneficial arrangement bore fruit for one corrupt health care executive who stole from his nursing home to buy himself a luxury yacht and Cartier watches.

Here’s what happened.

Last month, Trump quietly pardoned Paul Walczak, the son of a prominent conservative donor and former health care executive who, on the day after the 2024 election, pleaded guilty to tax fraud charges. Altogether, Walczak failed to pay over $10 million in taxes that he withheld from his workers’ paychecks and his nursing home’s share of Medicare and social security taxes, according to the Department of Justice. He used those millions for a lavish lifestyle, including purchasing a yacht.

He was sentenced on April 11th to 18 months in prison and ordered to repay just $4.3 million to the government.

But on April 4th, Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, attended the $1 million-per-person MAGA Inc. dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Just a few weeks later, Walczak was pardoned by Trump. The timing was suspicious, as well.

The New York Times reported:

“It came just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there ‘is not a get-out-of-jail-free card’ for the rich.”

Sure, not free. Just a $1 million dinner.

It’s a club sandwich of corruption.

Step 1: A wealthy executive cheats the system and steals from his own employees to buy a yacht.

Step 2: His mom showers the president—through his PAC—with $1 million. (Some people might call this a bribe.)

Step 3: The president abuses his power and pardons the tax cheat.

Step 4: The tax cheat doesn’t have to repay the government the millions he stole.

In a recent post, we covered how Trump is seemingly violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution by purportedly arranging the acceptance of the Qatari jet to facilitate personal, private use after leaving office. When left unchecked, a corrupt executive will have no incentive to abide by the law or any ethical guidelines.

Trump’s private crypto dinner was yet another example.

On May 22nd, Trump “hosted” a private dinner for the 220 top investors in his cryptocurrency memecoin—an inherently worthless digital asset with its only “value” derived from speculation—or, in this case, people vying for access to Trump.

We say “hosted” because, as attendees have pointed out, Trump made only a brief appearance before swiftly leaving.

Regardless, the biggest “investor” in the coin was Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun who, in 2023, was charged by the SEC for fraud. Anyone else noticing a pattern here?

But after Sun invested $30 million in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm World Liberty Financial—a private enterprise that the Trump family directly draws profit from—Trump’s SEC announced they were halting prosecution in Sun's case.

What luck!

Through his private properties, openly accepting bribes from foreign leaders, miscellaneous ventures, crypto initiatives—including an announcement just this week that Trump Media will raise over $2 billion to “buy Bitcoin” and more—Trump will continue to cheat, swindle, and profiteer through his second term.

Our elected officials and the courts must have an insatiable appetite for enforcing ethics and upholding the Constitution. It’s their job to hold Trump’s corruption accountable—and we won’t stop sounding the alarm until they do.

- MoveOn